Saladworks has had a tough year. The 100-unit, 100-percent-franchised chain based in Conshohocken, Pa., declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last February, and was bought out of it by New York City-based private-equity firm Centre Lane Partners last May. Since then, the chain has been working on refreshing the menu and remodeling restaurants, and last month it got a new CEO, Patrick Sugrue.
A previous COO of HoneyBaked Ham, Sugrue is also a director of Imvescor Restaurant Group Inc., a Montreal-based group that franchises four restaurant concepts in Canada. He also was CEO of Canadian pork processor Fearmans Pork Inc.
Sugrue discussed his plans for the 30-year-old chain, and how he ended up with that job, with Nation’s Restaurant News.
How did you end up as CEO of Saladworks?
The business that I went up to Canada to run called Fearmans Pork was a corporate carve-out from Maple Leaf Foods, and I went up there with Sun Capital Partners. They bought the assets there. So I was exposed to the folks in private equity through that experience. It was a very good experience. We were up there, all told, four years, and so afterwards I would work with private-equity firms to do due diligence on food businesses, and it just so happened that in my conversations with the folks at Saladworks they were looking for somebody with my background and experience with private equity and with restaurants and turnarounds. We hit it off and had a nice alignment in terms of the importance of growth, but doing growth the right way.
What are your priorities for Saladworks?
Post-bankruptcy, it’s really about instilling a culture of winning and growing. In my career I’ve been through situations where the investor and operators had a falling out. I’ve been through a CEO change; I’ve been through a bankruptcy. This team has dealt with that all in the last year. You think how disruptive that is for a franchise system — Do I grow or do I not? Do I invest in my concept or do I not? — and that kind of uncertainty and disruption is something that really took growth to a standstill.
So job No. 1 is really about acknowledging what the franchisees and headquarters folks have been through and how resilient the brand has been through that because of these dedicated people who have been responsible for keeping the business going.
It didn’t take long to realize the brand is strong, the relationship with their core consumer is very strong, and the franchisees are very committed to growth. They’ve just been looking for a vision and leadership to take them there.
Next, if you look at the number of stores we have that are well past their freshness date, we need to refresh a lot of restaurants. We’ve got a new store prototype that’s really working well. Like any prototype, though, there are some areas that we’re going to take from 90 to 92-percent great to 100-percent great. So we’re bringing in a lot of the franchisees to give us feedback, and we’re talking to consumers and we’re evaluating how that new prototype works. We’ve got our second and third franchisees who are going to adopt the prototype and adopt the changes that we’ve implemented since learning what works and what doesn’t.
What are some of the highlights of this remodel?
It’s a very inviting environment. It’s got the more industrial ceiling where you’re seeing all the ductwork. It’s got a higher ceiling, a beautiful vibe when you come in, more earthy tones consistent with the freshness that we uniquely deliver at Saladworks, and a layout that is very comfortable for our younger consumers, the Millennials, who are looking for a place to maybe get a salad and plug in their smartphones and drop some emails off or go on social media while eating their salads. We’ve got communal tables — six tops — where you’ll see groups congregate. There’s also some functionality [upgrades] in terms of queuing and reducing service times that we’re engineering in, and the communication of our menu items both in terms of what they look like and what the ingredients are.
How are you conveying that ingredient information?
We’ll have [paper] menus as people walk in, particularly at our busiest times, and then we’re incorporating digital media in the menu boards where they can see the items that are available and we can communicate messages to them while they’re ordering.
At a place like ours, our regular consumers are pretty comfortable with the concept and building their own salad, but we want to attract a lot of people who are new, who are just becoming aware of Saladworks, and we want to help them feel comfortable in our restaurants, either selecting a salad that is one of our signatures or creating their own, and talk them though how to do that.
Are there particular new ingredients you have in mind?
Chef-inspired menu innovation is a big part of what we’re trying to do, and so we’re talking to consumers about what products [they’d like to see], like baby kale and roasted butternut squash and Brussels sprouts. That’s not something that back in the day you’d see on many salad bars, but we were just tasting today different types of glazed pecans here in our headquarters. We’re looking for fermented kinds of salad dressings that are new.
I have a 24-year-old daughter who is a busy professional in the banking industry, and I’m amazed at how much she knows about her food and what she looks for and what she won’t eat if it doesn’t have the right designation. Frankly, we want to love on our core consumer who’s been coming to us for a long time, but for us to expand the way we plan to expand, we really need to embrace the Millennials and we need to understand their food trends, and we need to offer that unlike any other place they can go.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
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